Earlier this year, I felt like I was working many more hours than I used to - especially when I worked from home. I wanted a way to track how many hours I worked and where I worked those hours (my job doesn’t track my hours - so this was just for my information). Plenty of apps do this already, but I didn’t want to try out several apps, comb through reviews, or create new accounts to find the one that worked for me. I really only needed an app that did one thing: keep an exportable log of timestamps.
I decided to make a Shortcut. Shortcuts allow you to create tasks and automations for your devices. Shortcuts are useful for creating flows across multiple apps (i.e. check weather, check the commute, then go to the latest headlines), but can also get your phone to do exactly what you want without downloading more apps.
The shortcut I made is quite simple. It asks whether you are clocking in or clocking out and appends that action, the current time, location, and wifi network to a csv file. Since the location isn’t always precise, I figured the wifi network would be a more reliable indicator of location. I decided to write to a csv file instead of the Numbers app since the action to add a row to Numbers always opens the Numbers app - I wanted this shortcut to run in the background.
I made a spreadsheet to parse the csv file and extract certain features like day of week, week of year, and duration. Then I added pivot tables to summarize the total hours worked per day/week and the average hours worked on each day of the week at each location, and the average hours worked per day for all locations.
The shortcut and spreadsheet confirmed that I was indeed working more hours than normal. Since I started tracking my hours, I’ve focused on reducing the amount of time working by being more efficient when I am working.
Here are the links to the shortcut and an example of what the spreadsheet looks like (with fake data of course). Feel free to download / modify the shortcut and reach out if you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet for yourself :)